REDEFINING CULTURE AND LITERATURE IN TODAY'S WORLD OF SCIENCE

Abstract

The contemporary age of today is an age of guided missiles and misguided men. Man has reposed faith and trust on science to the extent that counting on calculators has surpassed and even suppressed the counting on beads. Account books and balance sheets are more discussed and debated than holy Bible, Gita and Quran. Artificial sun for light, nuclear plants for power and atomic reactors for energy have been created and built to make life comfortable, cozy and commendable. Instead of visiting churches and temples we visit hospitals, and laboratories for solace and serenity and strength. Life in the twentieth century is a baffling cocktail of the old and the new. Existentialism, surrealism and stream of consciousness co-exist with mythologies, fables and fairy tales. We are moved by man-made satellites and also by the albatross William Butler Yeats’ prophetic vision—“things fall apart, centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is lose upon the world and blood-dim tide is loosed” has come true in the form of natural calamities like the frozen Europe and parts of America, wild fires in Australia, floods in Turkey and more recently the floods in China and black-swans out of the blues in Japan followed by Katrina, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Morality, too, is an embellishment. Much talked about but the least observed. Morality, somehow, is being limited to matters pertaining to sex. Mrs. Grundys’ are prolific. Our Puritanism is akin to the prudishness of the Victorians. Khajuraho and Konarak are apparently forgotten. Kama Sutra appears in all purposeful mutilations: Essence of Vatsyayana: Hindu Philosophy of Love; Secret of Matrimonial Happiness; Illustrated Vatsyayana; or, any other imaginative title which the publisher can hit at. Our religion is mere sanctimoniousness. Dishing out through the Press and platform the supposed success of democracy, would not lead us anywhere: the real success has to stem from within. Thus, there is a lacuna between our thinking and living in all the spheres. Being unable to formulate, or more correctly, engender a new ethos suited to this age, we are clinging to the old standards of value. Therefore, we are hypocrites, fittingly with a capital ‘H’.